Christopher Mangum

Christopher Magnum “Fears”

2017 24″ x 24″ Acrylic and Collage

Christopher Magnum “Two-Headed Monster”

2017 5″ x 7″ Acrylic

Christopher Mangum “Expanded Consciousness”

2017 40″ x 30″ Oil

BIO

Christopher Mangum was born in Oakland, California in 1975, to a father who drove a taxi-cab in San Francisco and a very literary mother. He grew up in a home visited regularly by Hell’s Angels and Hippies along with wandering souls of all types. He studied Illustration at the Academy of Art College, receiving his BFA in 2000. There he took classes in drawing from life and studied figure and landscape painting in the tradition of California Impressionism. Since then he has received several awards for painting and drawing, and commissions by private collectors. He lives in Concord, California with a cat and a very stubborn chihuahua, and a guitar that he will perhaps someday take the time to learn to play.

ARTIST STATEMENT

The work of christopher mangum explores a variety of different ideas, but many of those ideas share common threads. There is an ever-present quest for an objective Truth. Not mere facts, but the underlying Truths that bind our thoughts and culture together, which most of the time we try to avoid thinking about. Also, he explores his fascination with the Insider and the Outsider. To some extent, all of us are Insiders—inside of our various clubs and cliques, inside of our families and businesses, inside of our nationality and other markers of collective identity. And yet we are also all marked as Outsiders. Everything that makes us unique and individual separates us from one group or another. Our separation from political power or macro-economic decisions can make us Outsiders. At times we can even feel like Outsiders within our own groups and colleagues, when we explore personal questions that are separate from theirs. Nearly everything can be expressed as some type of Inside vs. Outside duality. Where this thread of investigations will ultimately lead is unknown at this time, however there is some small hope that it may lead a step or two closer to that ultimate Truth that is so difficult to define.